Hello and welcome to the first edition of Always Be Zagging.

On a quick personal note, I'm in my 16th and final week of family leave. My twins are nearly five months old, and my eldest is about to turn three. Life is chaotic but meaningful, and I’m finding pockets of time in the evenings to write.

There are three topics in today’s newsletter.

1. Who should product marketers report to?

2. Founder Brands

3. Launch fatigue

Who should product marketers report to?

In my experience, if you ask this question to three different product marketers you’ll get three different answers.

Until recently I reported to Buffer’s Director of Growth Marketing. Before that, it was our Chief Product Officer and before that, our VP of Marketing. Maybe this speaks to hazy definitions of product marketing, but I’m inclined to think it reflects shifting business priorities. In a startup, everyone does product marketing. As the company matures, product marketing becomes a subcategory of marketing that roams across the organization.

Does your business need more help with attracting or retaining users? If the former, your PMMs should sit with marketing; if the latter, they should be with the product team.

Currently, I’m on the marketing team but report to the CEO. This is the best spot for a product marketer.

Why?

My top priority is crafting industry-level narratives that differentiate Buffer from competing products. Notice I say "crafting" and not "creating." That’s because I can’t develop a narrative on my own — it must come from the company’s chief storyteller, typically the founder/CEO. My role is to connect that narrative to everything we bring to market.

Getting stuck in the weeds is easy when you’re a product marketer. There are always new features to announce, one-pagers to write, metrics to be tracked, and copy to be finessed. Reporting to the CEO pulls you out of those weeds and brings clarity to what truly matters.

For additional context, the org chart below shows my CEO’s direct reports. I’m the only product marketer on the team.

Founder Brands

Speaking of CEOs and storytelling, chances are that if you’re reading this newsletter you work in tech. And chances are that if you work in tech, you’re familiar with Paul Graham’s recent essay, “Founder Mode”.

I shared my thoughts on the topic to Threads but I wanted to touch on something related; Founder Brands.

Increasingly, I’m noticing CEO personalities superseding corporate brands. It’s a trend that aligns with the age of influencers. Generally, people don’t follow companies—they follow other people.

Mark Zuckerberg’s brand evolution is an interesting example. Portrayed as callous in The Social Network and criticized for his congressional appearances, he has recently repositioned himself as a lovable, if a little goofy, fashion icon.

The advantages of a strong founder brand are many:

• PR: Breaking into the news cycle is easier with a recognizable leader.

• Brand Affinity: People relate more to a person than a logo.

• Differentiation: Products can be copied, but people can’t.

• Culture: It’s clear to everyone what your company stands for.

The risk of a strong founder brand is that it might alienate your customers if they have a divisive personality.

Founder brands aren’t confined to big tech CEOs. If you’re a leader at a startup or smaller business, I highly recommend you develop your brand. It’ll make your marketing team’s job a lot easier. At Buffer, we’ve been intentional about our entire team building their brands on social media. The benefit for us is two-fold. It helps us empathise with our customers—many of whom are content creators—and it amplifies our reach in campaigns.

Here’s a curated list of our team on X.

(Hopefully Threads will implement a lists feature soon!)

Launch fatigue

At Buffer, we aim to deliver value quickly, often incrementally. By keeping product releases small in scope, we maintain a tighter feedback loop with our customers. Ship fast, learn, and iterate accordingly.

The upside, from a marketing perspective, is that there is a steady drumbeat of new releases or enhancements to share with customers. Delivering improvements consistently generates goodwill.

The downside is what I call 'launch fatigue.' Launches begin to feel like a grind rather than something to celebrate, and engagement with your announcements starts to wane. Imagine if you had a birthday every week instead of once a year—eventually, you'd stop caring.

Most product marketers have a tiering system for product launches to help navigate launch fatigue. I’ve attempted to implement various iterations myself. Here’s what I currently use:

The idea is to reserve major launch campaigns for Tier 1 products.

I’ve found these tiering systems to be both helpful and awkward. Helpful because they provide a framework for managing marketing resources and internal expectations. Awkward because the tiers are subjective and often applied retroactively. We try to fit features into tiers after they’ve hit the roadmap, rather than build the roadmap around tiers.

Another way software companies create Tier 1 moments is by bundling “smaller” releases together into one larger launch event. Shopify does this with Editions, and Zapier with ZapConnect.

Last month, we ran an experiment at Buffer called Collaboration Week. You can read about the experiment here. In short, it was an opportunity to discuss strategic topics fully asynchronously.

I used the opportunity to share a proposal about doing seasonal launch events. Here’s what I wrote:

I also shared a link to this post by Brex’s CEO about rethinking how they build products and go-to-market. Here’s an inspiring excerpt:

My goal for Buffer is to maintain our steady drumbeat of releases but add seasonal launch moments to which we can anchor our Tier 1 releases.

Thanks for reading.

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